View full sizePatrick Hickok and Kelly Carmody are among the initial group of students enrolled in Linfield College's unique program devoted to exploring wine-related careers.Meghan Lockwood

Like many students, Kelly Carmody wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her life when she was a sophomore at Linfield College in McMinnville. She loved art but wasn't sure about her career prospects. Then, in 2012 during Linfield's January Term (a winter elective), she enrolled in an exploration of the wine industry.

The students visited Nectar Graphics, near campus, where designer Andrea La Rue showed them around her office and introduced them to the concept of branding. Carmody was entranced. "She (La Rue) had all of these wine bottles up on the wall with labels she had designed," recalls Carmody, now 21 and a senior. "I saw how she had created all these really awesome designs and how people really liked them, and how she was passionate about what she was doing and what she was creating."

The experience led Carmody to a major -- Electronic Arts -- and convinced her to apply to be one of the first students to embark on a new program at Linfield, launching this month. The Oregon Wine Industry Experience is a unique yearlong internship/externship program that will immerse an initial group of five Linfield students in wine-related career paths.

Universities and community colleges in the United States and throughout the world offer oenology and viticulture programs, as well as a growing number of wine-business programs. Chemeketa Community College, in Salem and McMinnville, recently hired its first full-time wine business and marketing instructor, Michael Adams, in response to an increased demand for wine-industry business skills.

What makes Linfield's Oregon Wine Industry Experience unusual is its liberal arts approach. For example, each student will complete an independent study project as part of the yearlong curriculum; Carmody is considering making hers a documentary film about the wine industry.

A growing field

The increased emphasis on wine-industry job training at institutions like Linfield and Chemeketa reflect a heightened demand for young talent in the rapidly growing $2.7 billion Oregon wine industry.

"There is definitely a need," says Alison Sokol Blosser, co-president at Sokol Blosser winery in Dundee. "We have been trying to hire a lot of people because we are opening a new tasting room and we are trying to staff up for the busy season. It has been a challenge; we have not had as many candidates as we thought we would have."

Part of Sokol Blosser's problem is finding young, energetic college grads who are comfortable using wine terminology, know their way around a winery and vineyard, and are familiar with sales, marketing and hospitality. It's a tall order, which is why Sokol Blosser's latest full-time hire, a consumer sales assistant, is a recent Linfield College grad who participated in the 2012 January Term program and stayed on as an intern afterward.

Jeff Peterson, director of the Linfield Center for the Northwest at Linfield College, designed the new program to span a full year in response to what he was hearing from potential employers like Sokol Blosser, and Martha Karson, Clint Foundation Manager at Vista Hills Vineyard & Winery in Dayton. Karson explained to Peterson that in order to really learn the business, students must be immersed in it for a full year. "When they first come to us, even if they have related work experience, they don't have any sense of the winery culture," Karson says. "That is the reason I hold so firmly to the yearlong commitment."

Four-season experience

The inaugural group of students in Linfield's Oregon Wine Industry Experience will work harvest and crush at local wineries in the fall, participate in the January Term wine-industry career exploration, then finish out the spring semester interning at a local winery, all while taking complementary coursework at school.

But before all that, they'll spend this summer out in the field and in the classroom, immersing themselves in a broad range of wine-related topics, from sustainable agriculture to marketing and distribution. A unit on matching wine with food will include working at the International Pinot Noir Celebration, which has been held at Linfield since 1987.

It's ironic that some Linfield trustees initially opposed hosting the IPNC back in 1987 -- due to the perceived impropriety of serving alcohol on a college campus -- while today, Linfield students are getting college credit for immersing themselves in the world of wine. They're even getting paid for it: Thanks to a grant from the James S. Kemper Foundation, each student will receive free housing and a $2,500 stipend for the summer, plus $1,000 for their spring internships.

That sounds pretty good to Patrick Hickok, who will be a Linfield senior next year. "This is a great deal," Hickok says. "You get to study something of interest and you're getting paid for it." The 21-year-old says he jumped at the Oregon Wine Industry Experience opportunity because he knows he'd like to work in the wine industry, but he's not sure in what capacity. "I'd like to start out working for a winery, and possibly, down the road when I am a lot older, owning a winery. That would be kind of cool."